usenet oddities issue 1 by dogstar 10/26/2020
originally published on rawtext.club
dogstar@rawtext.club

(issue 1? is this a textfile zine? uh, i don't know, uh...)

i have been in the middle of a project editing an anthology of sorts of a usenet 
community that was both fairly infamous and poorly preserved - 
alt.suicide.holiday. i don't need to talk much about the exact nature of that
group here, though i am willing to if you'd like, what i want to do is share
some of the joys and horror from using usenet in the year 2020.

(in recent years, .holiday has become a tld, i guess, causing past conversations
about the group in many areas to suddenly contain a url. i grabbed it and put up
the simplest guide i could for getting on usenet)

i was able to find the occasional statistics around usenet traffic, and while i
don't think it ever quite had a level of activity comparable to our day's social
media, it's clear that usenet is not what it once was. the vast majority of
groups will have, at best, a dozen spam messages, maybe a couple posts
reminiscent of AM talk radio catastrophizing, and a single on-topic message that
comes off as kind of deranged.

if a group has a level of activity that exceeds this noise floor, it's either
because the topic was highly specific enough to remain useful for certain
communities (such as some of the alt.autos subgroups for specific cars), or
there is something potent in the psychology of the topic itself to keep people
around and talking about it into 2020 (alt.assassination.jfk).

long story short, i've been doing some scrappy experiments to try and measure 
the traffic in usenet groups in october 2020 so far, and the results are pretty
weird. for a heuristic, i've only been counting posts that were posted solely
to a specific group, and not cross-posted between groups, to try and counteract
some of the spam and noise that lingers around.

--------------------

here's a few that i've dug into so far that i found for some reason compelling,
maybe horrifying, maybe sweet, i don't know.

alt.anonymous.messages - a utility of sorts that made total sense when i saw it.
the posts are all pgp-encoded messages from anonymous remailers. what could the
conversations be? mysterious! suspenseful!

alt.cooking.chefs - while this might make people uncomfortable, i find it kind
of funny that the current state of usenet is so mad max that literal cannibals
are taking over abandoned groups. yeah, alt.cooking.chefs has become a forum for
cannibal personal ads, more or less. in this group, as with all other groups
about personal ads, you'll see a lot of thirsty people in 2020 posting from
google groups, responding to posts from 1998 trying to get their attention.

alt.checkmate/alt.usenet.kooks - a pretty fascinating one to me. these are
sort-of epicenters for a particular group of radiation-hardened friends/trolls
to bicker at each other in a way that is reminiscent of twitter or maybe
something awful's fyad forum. i found talking with them to be fun but also kind
of jarring as a lot of them seem to be older and kind of not in a great state of
being. they crosspost a lot to a lot of different, random groups, stretching
their legs out in the wide-open space of usenet as it were.

alt.assassination.jfk - basically exactly what you'd expect, but compelling to
me in that one of the most on-topic and active communities on usenet still is
trying to truly dig into and solve this great mystery.

sci.physics.relativity - one of the few i looked at outside of the alt.*
hierarchy, this one is much like the above except it is instead, constant
bickering over whether or not relativity exists. 

talk.bizarre - kind of a refreshingly lighthearted group after looking at the
above, just random chatter and jokes that make very little sense.

--------------------

anyway, there are a bunch more of these, but i can't quite tell if this is as
compelling to anyway else as it is for me. long story short, if you want to hunt
around strange communities using a protocol that imho has a lovely interface,
there is still quite a lot to find.

this whole post is a bit slapdash because i wanted to write up a bit about a
topic i've been invested in in order to post a "hello" message on rawtext.club,
so: hello!